HOMEWORK
is a collaboration between artists Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Carlos Motta,
Lize Mogel, and Jeuno J.E Kim. Conceived as a study group, an editorial
team and a curatorial collaborative, HOMEWORK investigates relationships
between art and “the political”, education and politics, process
and product.

Wehave varied interests and unique individual practices, but share
a common ground in our critical engagement with the sociopolitical structures
explored in their singular artistic manifestations and curatorial projects.

Aside
from two physical meeting points in 2007, we use Skype every Tuesday as
a classroom for discussion and artwurl.org as a discursive exhibition
space to share our dialogues with a wider public. PS122 Gallery (NY) and Århus Kunstbygning (DK) are involved as exhibition
spaces for physical manifestations encapsulating the creative process
and presentations that went into and came out of our doing “homework”.

Participants
at Lize Mogel's "Economy of the Art World" workshop at HOMEWORK'S
"Summer School," June 2-24, New York.

The
title HOMEWORK suggests various levels of meaning. First, there is the
literal usage of the word “homework,” a school assignment
to be done at “home” in order to practice ones’ understanding
of the subject learned. Second, we thought about the words HOME and
WORK, thinking about them as spaces antithetical to each other. Home
is where one returns from work because one had to leave home to go to
work. Related to this is the relationship of work done at home, which
has often been devalued or illegitimated compared to work in the public
sphere. As artists and others in precarious labor situations, the line
is often blurred between the public/private spaces as sites for production.

Contesting
the purported neutrality of education, HOMEWORK aims to examine and
engage in alternative pedagogical models to understand the larger historical
context, learn to think from within the confronted problem, and to develop
creative responses. HOMEWORK is a project based on processes, where
each homework is a self-initiated assignment to practice our continuous
critical engagement with notions of the “political.”

Participants
at Blachly and Shaw "Monument Misunderstood" lecture at HOMEWORK'S
"Summer School," June 2-24, New York.

Curriculum
Focus: The Political
By implementing a “school” structure, HOMEWORK is constructed
to emulate a knowledge colony whose members serve as both teachers and
students, where each participant conducts and applies various research
models to understand better the idea of the “political”
and what it means to be a politically engaged cultural producer. We
implement an educational vocabulary and structures to contextualize
our focus on the process without a pre-determined product. Underlying
the project is an indirect call for analyzing educational settings as
necessary prescribed spaces for freedom of thought that can breed critical
thinking within an organic growth and exchange of knowledge between
artists.

There
has been a proliferation of exhibitions, articles and works that claim
to be politically engaged. The rise of neo-liberalist policies and constricting
political climates affect all sectors of society, and cultural producers
have a specific obligation to address what is being produced, discussed
and censored in the arts. To deal with this reality has become the locus
of many artistic practices. Within such a context, a danger also arises
where the “political” and activist-oriented cultural practices
become fetishes or trends. The discourse of art has operated and structured
itself along certain lines of intellectual thought such that when artists
or curators are called upon to state the “political” the
issue can become depoliticized, functioning only as a prop for inadequate
and amateur analyses that leads to a dead end. What does the “political”
mean then in the context of the visual arts?

Curriculum
Focus: The Pedagogical
With the tide of capitalistic systems, schools have become incubators
for generating professionalized workers that fit the efficient producer
profile. It is a fact that specializations in universities have been
corporatized, ensuring that research deemed worthy of analysis is dictated
by its market value. To break this trend, what kind of educational settings
in art can resist commodification and become appropriate situations
for what Gayatri Spivak has termed to be a process of “unlearning”?
This led us to look at different pedagogical strategies used by artists,
to create a program of learning and producing knowledge whose nexus
is criticality rather than a subscription to any dogmatic paradigm.

We
also focus on education and specifically how art education is affected
by the corporatizing of schools and the rise of knowledge based industries
in NY and DK. Given the nature of artists’ precarious labor, they
often seek employment as art teachers. While this condition may have
risen out of economic necessity, it is also a position of power where
artists deliver and share their know-how with the next generation. We
are interested in examining the emergence of alternative educational
programs and groups, artists using pedagogical methods in informal ways,
as well as artist collectives who creates spaces for "educational"
exchanges that attempt to apply democratic methods of communication
and learning.

The
End: See you!
As a research unit, it is necessary for our collaborations to take place
on site, as well as at a distance. In May-June 2007, Jeuno JE Kim and
Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen were in residence in New York. In August
2007, Lize Mogel and Carlos Motta were in residence in Århus.